11.06.2010

The second advertising campaign I wanted to tell you about is creating a facebook ad.

I designed an ad using our logo to link to the website that I created over the summer (more about this in an upcoming post). Basically I wanted to drive traffic to our new site, so students would know who we are and what we are about. You can target facebook ads to a specific audience, so I was able to make it appear only on people's pages that are in the UNCG, High Point, and Wake Forest University networks. This gave me access to about 30,000 students.

You can pay to advertise per click or per thousand impressions (each time they put the ad on someone's page it's an impression, even if they don't see it, and they rotate through several depending how long folks are on facebook). So you bid a price you are willing to pay up to for each click or each 1,000 impressions and if it wins cheaper than that you pay only what it would take to win. Also, you can cap the amount of money per day you are willing to pay...I chose $15. Of course, this is my first effort at this and I wanted to experiment with it, so we used it at the beginning of the school year (most people check facebook very frequently during this time so it's good for exposure but bad for expenses being more costly to win the bids). My desire is that many people would at least see or be exposed to Crusade by seeing the ad and hopefully click thru to the website and get involved in Crusade on their campus.

Here are the results for 2 weeks worth of advertising:
1,712,663 impressions (1.7 million!)
163 clicks on the ad to our website
about 5 people filled out contact info on the website
average over 10 clicks a day
cost about $213

So I gained some good experience working with this median that I can hopefully use in the future to fine tune advertising to increase exposure or maybe even use to promote a certain event...like going on summer projects to our students. It was worth a shot!

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"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day."Jimmy V